Flourless Pistachio and Calamansi Cake

To say that I'm a bit of a cooking magazine fiend is an understatement. If I were to be completely honest, I'd say that it's a gotten to be a terrible habit. I am always hooked by the pretty cover photo and a few select recipes in the magazine. Said publication ends up in my shopping cart and then I completely forget about it. At present, I have a rather sizeable pile of magazines to go through... that doesn't stop me from scowling at Ant whenever he tries to stop me from buying more from the supermarket.

The thing is though, I have picked up a few gems from these magazines and some recipes have inspired me to tweak and modify them to greatness too. This recipe is based on a recipe that I got out of a Donna Hay magazine. I liked the cake on it's own but I felt like it needed a little something extra - so I decided to marry it with the happy hippy cake recipe by adding the lemon soak to the recipe.

The modification doesn't stop there.

My calamansi trees are currently heavy with fruit. I'd wanted to make a calamansi jam but realised that I didn't do the necessary prep. Impatience to use the calamansi I had picked resulted in me creating a calamansi soak to go with this cake.

Flourless Pistachio and Calamansi cake

150g butter, softened
165g caster sugar
1 cup pistachio meal
1 and a half cups almond meal
1 tsp calamansi zest (optional)
4 eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla essence
100g icing sugar
100ml calamansi juice

Method:

1. Preheat the oven at 160 degrees
2. Whisk the butter and sugar until the mixture turns pale and creamy.
3. Add the eggs, one by one, mixing well
4. Once all the eggs have been added, add the vanilla essence and beat for a further 3-4 minutes.
5. Fold in the almond meal, pistachio meal and calamansi zest
6. Bake for about 1 hour, or until a skewer comes out clean
7. In the meantime, make the soaking syrup by mixing the icing sugar with the calamansi juice.
8. Once the cake has cooled, slowly pour the syrup over the cake in increments. Be patient with this process, as flooding the cake can make it soggy.Ensure the cake has absorbed most of the liquid before adding more.
9. Serve with a side of cream or vanilla ice cream

Notes: 

• This recipe has a very strong calamansi flavour. In the future, I would probably dilute the calmansi juice with water so that more of the pistachio flavour comes through.
• I might even reduce the amount of syrup I make. My original test used 150-150 juice and sugar but that was way too much. I suspect that this modified amount might still be too much. 
• Similar to the happy hippie recipe, I used a silicon mould for this cake. The mould is perfect because there's room for me to pour the syrup and let it soak into the cake... and if you think unmoulding a cake from a normal pan is hard, try unmoulding a super moist cake!
• I have another recipe twist in mind... so stay tuned :)